The 2025 A to Z challenge is over. I finished. My theme this year was the A to Z's of me .
During the last few weeks of each year I spend a lot of time tinkering with the look of my blog. I made a text box called Me from A to Z. It had an attribute of me from A to Z. As I shared in my theme reveal the original 26 attributes were :
Amateur Parodist, Blogger, Christian, Daring do-gooder, Evangelical sans Trump Kool-Aid,
Father of 3 adult children, Giraffe lover, Husband of one amazing wife, Illinois resident,
Jester, Kindred spirit, Library lover Middle School teacher, Nincompoop, Original, Poet,
Quintessential worker , RITA (Republican in theory, anyways.) ,Sixty something
Teller of jokes,U of I Parent - ILL,Voracious reader, Willy Wonka Wannabe, Xenophile ,Yankovic enthusiast ,Zoo attender
I made the list , put it on my blog home page and kinda forgot about it. As I began to prepare for the challenge I ruminated between several ideas for themes. I thought about going without a theme
or even not participating and just concentrating on reading and commenting. Then I remembered the list. I hadn't even considered using it for the challenge when I created it.
As I began to prepare posts that matched the titles it became clear that some of those titles weren't going to make it to the final product. I have emboldened the attributes I didn't use in the list above and the attributes I replaced them with in the links below. For example in the middle of March I stopped subbing at the middle school I'd been at for over 2 years. So M for Middle school had to go. Others were so similar that expanding on them made it seem like I was being redundant.
H was for Husband of One Amazing Wife
This is the 4th year that I have been copying and pasting the same introduction at the beginning of my posts. I did use 2 variants of the intro this year: 1 for when I was posting on time and 1 for when my posts were late. In the latter I would say how many posts I was behind. I stayed up to date from amateur to Iguchi and caught up at Xenophile and was still on pace when I ended at zoo. I was late for a little more than 1/2 of the challenge. The funny thing is I posted on my blog on both the K and the L day which is where I fell behind. They just weren't A to Z posts.
Being behind didn't bother me too much. I was always confident that I would finish. It did impede with my reading and commenting on blogs which was the least I have ever done in all my years doing the challenge. I did get to more of that in the last few days once I caught up.
Something I did this year that really helped me get to this reflection right away is that from day 2 I built the index of the challenge on my daily post. So, it was a simple matter of changing the topic from the previous day from "A is for " to "A was for" and then copying and pasting the whole thing to the current letter. Today all I did was take my list from the beginning of Wednesday's post and change is to was for Z. I'll change them all back to is when I put the index on a page in my blog later this month.
One thing that surprised me this year was how many of my posts had political or spiritual components. I guess I shouldn't be so surprised since my theme was me and I do have spiritual and political components. I did go hard after Trump on 3 occasions and restrained myself from making it four when I was writing X is for xenophile.
There were many posts including lots of A, some of B, and all of C where I reused previous posts, pictures, poems and songs. Again, with the subject being me, it felt natural to share as many examples of me as possible.
A is for Amateur Parodist may have been my favorite post this year. It had links to works by 3 other parodists, examples of some of my older parodies, and 2 that were written while I was writing the post. I was especially proud of Amlodopine, which is a parody of Yesterday that starts with someone singing the praise of the efficacy of their blood pressure medicine and quickly changes into a rant of how Trumps first 100 days is making him more dependent than ever on the medicine. In my mind, the song became an homage to the old Sesame Street segment when Kermit The Frog would interview Don Music at the piano and after a little head bashing on the piano due to writer's block the lyrics of the song would change dramatically from the original.
